


Funeral Mute

by AnnabelLenore



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler, Sweeney Todd (2007)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-21 00:18:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/591319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnabelLenore/pseuds/AnnabelLenore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the ill-fated night in the bake-house, Tobias escapes and attempts to put as much distance as possible between himself and that place of death, only to wind up at the Undertaker's funeral parlour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Funeral Mute

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings and welcome to installment the first of my newest fan fiction Funeral Mute, a commingling of my favourite musical and my favourite anime/manga centering around my favourite character from each respective work and inspired by chapters four through five of Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist. Movie-verse/ predominately first anime-verse. Enjoy.

_i_

Her screams had ceased to ricochet against the stone walls. The blood had ceased to flow and was now congealing in sticky red clumps on the cold floor. The boy’s hands shook and he dropped the blood stained silver straight razor on the floor. It hit the ground with a loud clatter, the sound bounced around the walls much like her screaming, then died away.

Like the hero in some fairie tale he had slain the demon, but at what cost? He had lost the damsel in the bargain. There would be no cottage by the sea. There would be no happy ending. His castle in the air was now no more than a pile of ashes. Everything he had cherished had vanished like a dream in the first moments of waking.

He took a few tentative steps towards the oven and pulled the heavy door open. A blast of hot air hit his face along with the smell of burnt flesh. Her charred skull still with a few pieces of papery, blackened skin clinging to it was turned towards him. Her vacant eye sockets stared blankly up at him. All the demon in hell were screaming.

He slammed the door shut with a loud bang to try to shut it all out, but the voices and the smell still wormed through. He quickly backed away, mindful not to trip over any of the numerous scattered corpses, and then ran up the steps and out of the bake house. He slammed the heavy door behind him and cautiously walked into the parlour. This place of warmth and happiness was now as cold and dismal as a tomb. He picked up a well loved picture of her and tears began to well up in his eyes. First they were tears of sorrow, but they then turned to those of anger, not against her but himself. He slammed the picture against the mantle and the glass in the frame shattered. A series of loud shrieks erupted from the basement. Without a second thought he ran pell-mell out of the shop and into the dark, empty street trying to get as far away from that place of death as he could.

_ii_

The black clouds which hung over the city were just beginning to turn dull grey as morning was breaking. The boy sat shivering and out of breath in a dingy alley way. He had spent that night and into the early hours of the morning running as fast as he could from Fleet Street, taking back alleys and keeping away from major road ways. He ran until his lungs ached. Now that he had given himself a chance to rest, he could finally gather his thoughts. He wondered if the police had shown up at the shop yet. If they had already found the bodies. If they suspected him. If they were looking for him now. The thought of being arrested and sent to the gallows gnawed at him. It was not his own execution that frightened him the most, but rather the thought of where he was headed afterwards. If there are demons, he reasoned, then there must be a Hell, and that the Fates had decreed that he was to join them. He felt that God had forsaken him, just as others had done before.

Even though he had done the world a justice by ridding it of  a murderer, he had still let the one person who meant the entire world to him perish; and he would never, ever forgive himself for that. Yes, as much as he didn’t want to admit it, she had a hand in the diabolical deeds, but that did not mean that she deserved to die. Or did it?

All of these thoughts were too much for him to take in at that moment. He picked up a broken piece of cobblestone that had dislodged from the road and threw it as hard as he could across the alley. It hit a rubbish bin with a loud band which sent a whole nest of rats scurrying away squeaking. Fearing that someone might have heard this commotion, he sprang to his feet and ran out of the alley.

_iii_

He spent that day as well as the two subsequent ones roaming the back alleys of London. In that time he had neither slept not eaten anything. He had no money on his person and did not want to risk the chance of bringing attention to himself by stealing. A few times he had curled up on the ground in a vain attempt to get even a few minutes of repose, but every time he would being to slip into unconsciousness the nightmarish scenes from that night would play before him, making him sit up with a gasp. He felt staying awake and on the move was the better option for him anyway, just in case the authorities were indeed looking for him.

On this third day he kept getting a feeling as if he was being followed. Every time he turned around he was almost positive that he saw a dark figure dart past. It may have been his own imagination commingled with extreme exhaustion, but he was positive that someone was following him. As the morning wore on his anxiety became more acute. His heart was beating frantically to the point where he felt it would rip right out of his chest. He could take it no longer. He had to get away from who ever or what ever was following him. He began running down the various alleys making sharp, erratic turns in order to confuse his pursuer, genuine or contrived. In his panic he did not pay attention to where he was going and tripped over some object in his path. He fell to the ground hard and in the process smashed his head against a cobblestone which had become dislodged from the road. He blow knocked him unconscious.

_iv_

Undertaker was having a particularly slow day at the funeral parlour. Despite the cold front that had moved in there was a lack of decedents as a result. He knew they would come in eventually, as they always did, but today just was not the day. The two guests that had come to him that day had both died of natural causes and were brought to him only a few hours after death had occurred, which meant that they warranted no special embalming or restorative methods. He had set both of their features and completed the embalming in no time at all, leaving his schedule for the rest of the day completely void.

Later in the afternoon as evening was approaching he decided to take a stroll about the city. The sky was filled with dense, dark clouds and a cold drizzle of rain was falling at intervals, the reminisce of a rain shower earlier that afternoon. The silver-haired mortician did not mind this type of weather at all, in fact he rather enjoyed it. The dismal weather meant that there would be few people on the street which allowed him the peace to lose himself in his thoughts. As he turned down a back alley he spotted something laying in the middle of the street. On closer examination he discovered that it was a body laying face down. He gently turned the body over and found that it was a boy no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. His clothes were dirty and disheveled and damp from the earlier rain shower. His dark hair was matted with blood around his right temple. There was no colour in his face and his eyes and cheeks were sunken in. The body was ice cold. He quickly checked the boy’s pulse and felt nothing. The flexibility still in the boy’s limbs meant that he had not been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in. Undertaker giggled gleefully at the prospect of a new client. He scooped the dead boy into his arms and carried him off it his shop.

When he had gotten back to the shop he brought the body into the embalming room at the back of the parlour and placed him on the porcelain table in the center of the room. Before continuing any further he brought out a large leather-bound black book, his Record of Bodies and Effects. He emptied the boy’s pockets and found nothing. From the boy’s appearance Undertaker assumed that the boy was nothing more than an orphaned street urchin with no one to identify him or claim his body. He wrote at the top of the page in his log book “Unidentified”. After disrobing the corpse and documenting the clothing he began to examine the body itself. He started first with the hands.

“You can tell so much about a person from their hands.” the mortician commented to himself out loud and punctuated the sentence with a short chuckle.

There was dirt under the nails and an array of old scars crisscrossing the knuckles. The palms were severely calloused.

“You were a hard worker, weren’t you, boy? Well, I suppose you’ll be able to rest easy now. Hehe~”

Just as Undertaker was turning to document his findings in his book, he heard a faint moan emit from the corpse. He was used to hearing strange noises come from decaying corpses caused by the gases escaping the body, but this body looked to be very fresh. He looked intently at the body on the table and waited to see if it did anything more or if the sound was just from his imagination. A few moments later the body made the same noise again. Undertaker raised an eyebrow. He placed his ear against the boy’s chest and listened. He heard the faint sound of breathing. He checked the boy’s pulse again and felt the faint, slow beating of his heart. A bit to Undertaker’s chagrin this newest guest was indeed still alive, if only barely.

_v_

The boy’s eyes slowly flickered open. He drifted in the uneasy limbo between sleeping and waking a few moments before his eyes could properly focus. Leaning over him was a tall man in black robes with long silver hair that covered most of his face. A black top hat was perched atop his head and he was smiling from ear to ear.

“Goooood morning~! I see that you’re finally awake.”

The boy’s brown eyes widened and he quickly sat up. A sharp pain shot through his temple. He held his hand to his head and grimaced.

“Easy there, boy.” the Undertaker cautioned. “You’ve got quite the lump on your head. When I found you, you were out cold. I _thought_ you were dead, but clearly you are not. What a pity, though, you would have made such a pretty corpse.”

The boy gave him a questionable look. “W-who are you? W-where am I?” he asked.

The man’s smile widened. “I am the Undertaker.” he said with a bow. “And this,” here he gestured with a wave of his arm “is my humble funeral parlour.”

The boy looked around his surroundings for the first time. To his left was the hearth with a fire lit. Across the room was another settee, curiously shaped like a coffin and next to it an over-stuffed chair. While he was looking about the room, Undertaker had snatched what looked to be an urn off of one of the end tables. He opened the lid, took out a bone-shaped funeral biscuit, and popped it into his mouth.

“Would you like one~?” he asked and shoved the cremation-urn-turned-cookie-jar under the boy’s nose . Thinking it impolite to refuse, he hesitantly took one of the biscuits out of the jar. He sniffed it. It smelled pleasantly of cinnamon. His stomach rumbled. He looked from the biscuit to Undertaker and back, then took a bit out of the biscuit. He found it to be quite good.

“Good, aren’t they?” the mortician commented. “You’d probably like some tea, wouldn’t you?”

Before the boy had a chance to answer, the silver-haired man had disappeared from the room. In his absence the boy had an opportunity to get a better look at the room he was in. The walls were done in a dark-hued wallpaper that begun to peel in some places. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the ceiling. On the dusty mantle piece a human skull sat between two vases that held long-dead lilies. Several large, leather bound books were stacked haphazardly on an end table next to the over-stuffed chair. The macabre decorum disconcerted him slightly. 

Several minutes later Undertaker returned with two steaming beakers full of tea. He handed one of the beakers to the boy and then sat down on the over-stuffed chair with his own beaker. The boy stared into the dark liquid in the beaker for a few moments.

“Go on now, take a drink. It’s not poisoned I promise.” The man said with a chuckle. The boy finally took a drink.

Even though he had been awake for only a short amount of time the boy felt exhausted. The warmth from the fire place and the warm, slightly sweet tea were making him even more drowsy and he drifted back off to sleep.

 

  

 

　


End file.
